The Ultimate Good Luck (13 page)

When he hit Chicago it had stopped snowing and the wind had
settled, and the woman came uptown to meet him. He drove them in her car to the South Side into Hyde Park, where the buildings were old and elegant and built close to the street. At a stoplight a block from her house, a long purple Toronado with Indiana plates had eased away from the curb and blocked both southbound lanes, and Quinn had touched the horn to get past. But when he came abreast, the light changed red, and the driver of the Toronado jumped out of his car and ran toward him.

“Why the fuck did you honk at me?” the man screamed at him. He was tall and black and wearing a long leather jacket. He kept looking down the street quickly as if someone was watching him.

Quinn opened his window. “To get you off the dime,” he said up at the man. He glanced back at the light.

The man’s features began to strain, fighting a lawless urge inside himself, an urge that had an old-time hold on him. His mouth seemed to get longer, and Quinn recognized that look. It was the maniac expression of someone about to go to war, the look of fighting off cowardice with insanity. He sympathized, but there was nothing he could do, “You fuck.” The man raged and stamped his feet and ground his hands together. But at that moment the light went green, and he looked up at the man and said, “Can’t help, pal,” and eased away, and the man suddenly swung widely, a hard plunging blow, that hit him on the arm above the elbow and tore a gash through his down jacket and into his triceps, spilling blood and down over the windowsill and making him barge into the other lane and jump the curb. The woman said, “Oh shit,” and he began to feel the blood drying.

When he had bailed out, the man had run already to his Toronado and was racing up Kenwood Avenue, leaving Quinn standing in the snow in the middle of the street in terror, wishing he had a gun to blow somebody’s head off.

The cut was superficial and didn’t need stitches. The woman put Merthiolate on it in her bathroom and said she thought he’d
been cut with a bottle opener or a key ward, and that the man had been swinging at his face when the car moved, and he had gotten lucky. His jacket was a loss and he had gotten blood on his whipcords, but when he had spent an hour with the woman in her apartment across from Jackson Park and the I.C., he made up a story that he wanted to see a friend who lived on the North Side, and took a cab up to Randolph Street and stayed all night by himself in the Holiday Inn overlooking the lake, unable to sleep until he could see the winter haze begin to brighten and clear toward Michigan.

But it had all given rise to a feeling he had never had before, even late in the war, down to days, a conspicuous undisciplined fear of enormous injury. A peacetime fear. Sitting out nights in the frozen basswoods below Elk Lake, listening for trolling motors easing down into the shallows of the Rapid River, sinking steelhead weirs between the first narrow sand shoals, he would suddenly sense something nearby, something that would hit him and blow him to pieces, and he’d pitch sideways in the Scout to miss whatever it was, though there was nothing. Delivery boys backing a TV out of an appliance-store door would make him scrounge up high in his stomach, ready to receive a killing blow. And at night in the trailer, barely asleep, there’d be the same galvanizing shock that threw him up in bed shuddering from the instinct that he’d almost been hit by something falling, though there was nothing to hit him, and no one in the trailer but him, and his pistol beside the bed. And every time he had the fear, he’d picture in his mind not the junkie who’d cut him on Kenwood Avenue, which he thought was the cause of it, but the snowman in the train yards in South Bend, standing erect and by himself, smiling out at some disaster rising up on the horizon.

He thought now, though, watching the lights beginning to prickle out across the valley and beyond the mountain rim like greying stars, that the threat of death in that instance was only the dark side of something else, something he needed—Rae, maybe—and would have to live with unexplained until he got
it, or until he stopped wanting it anymore, and at the same time stopped wanting everything else too, which was just a disaster of a different order.

He began to smell the dense fragrance of other places, the evening coming slowly on the city, the pale nimbus of town light rising into the ash sky. Doves had settled into the eucalyptus branches, and he could hear a bus crawling up the Reforma Hill into the twilight. The music truck was gone and a sweet dirt and cinnamon odor shifted and wandered up through the evening atmosphere. It was the smell of town streets, emptied for the night except for the fruit stands and tortillerías out the Avenue Garcia Vigil.

Rae stood at the glass door, her hair thick and wet against her neck, her skin roughed and pink in the nearly gone light. He smelled her now, the sour streaminess of the bathroom and the sweet oil she used. She seemed taller than he remembered.

“Are we in the tropics now?” She pressed her hair between the folds of her towel, but he didn’t watch her.

“The Torrid Zone,” he said.

“It just feels out of date, to me.” She let her head come to the side, letting her hair fall. “When I was in the shower I tried to think of one act of kindness between Sonny and me, you know, just something little. And I could only think of one.”

He looked at her in the doorway, framed by the table lamp she had turned on behind her. Her breasts were full only to the sides of her rib cage, her head tilted against the doorjamb. Her body had a generosity that making love didn’t have anything to do with.

“One might be a lot,” he said.

Her face became composed. “One time, you know, when we were living in Bay Shore before my father decided to be an artist, Sonny was trying to hit a golf ball into South Bay, and I was standing too close behind him, and he turned around and said, ‘Get out of the way, Rae.’ And that was all. He thought he was a golfer. Isn’t that pitiful?”

He could feel the air slide past his face into the open doorway. It reminded him of something from when he was a boy, something out of the lake after dark, but he couldn’t think exactly what it was now. Something he’d liked, but lost. “You know what I’d like?” he said.

“Not to talk about Sonny,” she said.

“That’d be all right,” he said. “But I’d like it if you stayed a little longer than tomorrow.”

She stepped across the flat stones close to him, the towel around her breasts. He smelled her skin in the air, felt the whorl of hair in the channel of her back. All the veins were blue under her skin. “Aren’t you afraid?” she said.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. He heard the clock strike seven in the zócalo and again elsewhere in town, seconds later. A dog began barking in the rich cabañas below the bungalow, a sound like a turkey’s cluck, fast and frequent and disappointed.

“We make love at odd times, you know,” she said softly, coming nearer. “Late in the day’s such an odd time.”

B
ERNHARDT WAS IMMERSED
in driving the streets, as though he wanted to avoid something unpleasant. Quinn had left Rae in the Portal watching the Indian musicians preparing to play again in the kiosk. The Centro was crowded with evening tourists, and all the Christmas decorations had been turned on. He had ordered her a beer, and she said she could stand it an hour alone.

Bernhardt was still wearing the beige suit. He drove out toward the Avenue of the Niños of Chapultepec, which divided the middle-class from the poor districts, then switched back toward the airport highway. There were soldiers in the dark streets, patrolling specified houses, teenagers in camouflaged helmets sporting big M-16s. They looked condensed and undernourished in the shadow lights, like true guerrillas, their faces identical and obscure.

Bernhardt merged out onto the peripheral boulevard at the boundary of the slum barrios, into a district where the town buses turned back toward the Centro. There was little traffic, and the helium lamps gauzed the air and made it hang in the night. Bernhardt didn’t speak. He drove a mile on the periférico, past
the airport turnoff, then took a road that crossed the Atoyac and the train line from Mexico City, and went into the palms where there was suddenly no light, and the road became laterite. They were close to where the men beside the Pepsi truck had disappeared into the riverbed, and Bernhardt had begun to drive faster.

“Does it matter if you hit somebody?” Quinn said.

Bernhardt shook his head. He watched the road attentively as it narrowed into the dense palms. “The law makes more trouble than the good you do to stop. If no one is caught the death is bad fate. But when the law takes you, it wants to determine why things.
Why
do you do this?
Why
you do that? And if you don’t mean to, there’s no why, and they never let you go. But the man is still dead.” Bernhardt elevated his chin in affection for his explanation.

“Where’s this going?” He thought about Rae in the Centro. It was making him edgy to be away.

“It will take only a few minutes.” Bernhardt flicked up the brights, and Quinn could see up the long corridor of palm trunks diminishing quickly into a hole of darkness. It felt like a picture from a dream in which events never completely conclude.

“Do you fear becoming old?” Bernhardt asked expansively, keeping his eyes on the road.

“I fear not becoming old a lot more,” Quinn said.

“How many years are you?”

“Just thirty-one,” Quinn said.

Bernhardt smiled. The dash light made the frames of his glasses shine. “For you, though, love is a place where you don’t grow old. Is that right?”

“Sure thing. You put your finger right on it.” He had a feeling he’d see Deats tonight, but he couldn’t guess why. Bernhardt was trying to keep his mind occupied.

“I
do
fear it,” Bernhardt said emphatically. He kept his chin high. “I am forty, a young man. But I consider sometimes suicide. It is only fear of being old, do you agree?”

“I go the other way,” Quinn said. “At least I hope I do.”

“You were in the war,” Bernhardt said. “You don’t think of suicide now.”

“Maybe later,” Quinn said. He stared at the undifferentiated wall of trees. “What’s happened with Deats?” he said.

“Nothing,” Bernhardt said.

“But it’s getting done right?”

“Yes. But it is best to be very cautious now,” Bernhardt said. “Mr. Deats is not a mystery. But he is a problem to be solved. And we must take pains.”

Bernhardt stopped the Mercedes in the dark in front of what looked like an implement shed Quinn wouldn’t have noticed in the trees, though the shed was built partway into the road so that you could hit it without looking for it, and past it the road quickly dwindled into a pony path and disappeared. The air swarmed up sweet and heavy in the darkness, and there was no noise besides the car ticking. Inside the shed a green candle struggled to illuminate a plank bar that had been set up on oil cans and a glass basin in the dirt underneath it with a hose siphon leaking some kind of mescal.

Bernhardt walked around the shed and into the gallery of bamboo, taking a blind path that led immediately past a row of rattan shanties with sheet metal roofs, lower than his head and invisible from the road. They walked into a shallow ditch and up beside what smelled like a trough of smoking vegetable refuse that made Quinn’s eyes sting. Some of the shanties had papers on their fronts fanning a strike at the technological college, but no one was inside any of the doors, and the thought of a strike in the undergrowth seemed funny. The path through huts reminded him of two things at once, neither one funny and both dangerous: a
ville
on the coast below Phan Rang where there was a woman who had said something to him in French that he was willing to get killed to check out again. The other was of almost any place on any trail in-country that became a sudden killing zone, some dense place you took fire first at the
waist, then the ankles, and had no place to return it, and lay shot-up, waiting until you got it stuck in your ear. Memory seemed like an account full of the wrong currency.

They walked until Bernhardt seemed to recognize one of the shanties and turned, his face pale and wide in the dark. He motioned with his hand and leaned through the mosquito netting that covered the door.

The air inside was cool and smelled like battery acid. Quinn felt exhilarated, though he was blind and his eyes were dilating too slowly.

Bernhardt suddenly struck a match and held it up. Against the straw wall was a wood cot and the outline of something white laid out on it. Above the cot was a poster of Elvis Presley wearing his yellow satin suit and red, white, and blue guitar, and looking ornery. When Bernhardt moved near the cot Quinn could make out a man in a muslin communion suit rolled up to the calves and a red sash tied in folds around his waist. The man appeared to be sleeping, though there was a long purple scar on his head that had cut off the helix of his ear, and made it clear the man wasn’t sleeping.

Bernhardt knelt and put the match near the man’s face. “Dionisio,” he said loudly, as if he was trying to wake the man up. Bernhardt stared at the damaged face, which was candle-colored and had ulcers. “Hermano,” Bernhardt said. Quinn felt suddenly that someone had entered the room. He turned and stepped back quickly, but no one was there, and Bernhardt’s match died. He felt exhilarated again and unreachable, as though everything he had seen had been sucked out of existence. A second match hissed, and Bernhardt was looking at him, waiting for the light to make him able to speak.

“This is the man who sells your brother cocaine,” Bernhardt whispered. The match plumed up brightly between his fingers. Bernhardt looked at the man on the cot beside him. “Dionisio,” he whispered, and turned back toward the cot. He drew the match to the man’s cheek, held it close as though examining something
infinitesimal on the surface of the skin, then extinguished it there.